felix FRIDAY 09 OCTOBER 2009
Technology Editor Samuel Gibbs
TECHNOLOGY
Hello Google Wave!
What’s all this Waving business about and why should you care?
Samuel Gibbs Technology Editor
So, what’s all this Waving business
all about and should you care? Well
Wave is Google’s new communication
project that is somewhat difficult to
describe, but is based around an amal-
gamation of IM, email and real-time
collaboration services. It’s currently
in a closed beta, recently expanded to
100,000 testers (all invited manually
if we’re to believe the buzz) and may
revolutionise the way we communicate
with our friends, co-workers and fam-
ily across the internet.
I’ve got MSN/Yahoo/AOL/Gtalk IM
already, and email, why would I want
something else? Well, imagine a we-
bapp that you can login to from any-
where with a browser, that gave you
collaborative blend of IM and email
with a load of sharing features all in a
tidy and unique package. That’s what
Google’s aim is for Wave. It’s some-
thing that you’ll have to see to really
understand but one of its stand out
features is the instant character broad-
cast. That is, the text you type instantly
appears in the Wave for everyone to see
the moment your finger hits the key.
Now in my mind this will lead to a load
of typos, but if we gloss over that, we
could have collaborative conversations
where you can interpret what people
are saying, edit it in real-time and even
finish their sentences for them. Replies
can be started in a separate message,
but you can also reply to someone’s
sentence right in that sentence mean-
ing you no longer have any ambiguity
to who or what you might be replying
to. The Wave also represents a persist-
ent message a bit like email, meaning
you can invite people or send them the
Wave at a later date. They’ll get all the
conversation and edits and be able to
play it back blow by blow with the re-
play feature. This means for instance,
if you’ve got a conversation about a
busted piece of equipment that needs
fixing between two colleagues that is
Weekly Wrap Up - The Best of the Rest
Samuel Gibbs Technology Editor
This week has been an interesting
week for Tech. First off on the big
news, Apple/Intel announced and
demonstrated a new data transmission
system the aptly named, Light Peak,
which is capable of up to 10Gbps over
an optical interconnect up to 100m in
length. Managing to both smoothly
drive a greater than HD res monitor
and saturate a speedy SSD raid with
a file transfer over one connection,
shows this could be a real contender
with USB 3.0, FireWire and Display-
Port. The idea behind Light Peak is to
reduce the number of connections and
standards you need on a single device
and with that kind of bandwidth I can
seriously see it replacing a lot of con-
technology.felix@imperial.ac.uk
up for debate, they can talk it all out
with costs and alternatives in a Wave.
Once they’ve come to a conclusion of
how to proceed, they can then send the
whole Wave to their boss who can see
all the information but doesn’t need to
haggle over the details to sign off on.
It’ll be a lot cleaner and much more ef-
ficient than sending a chain of emails,
especially if more than one or two peo-
ple are replying, something that makes
a complete mess of emails.
Waves are more than collaborative
IM sessions though. You can directly
embed media in them via simple drag
and drop. Photos, YouTube videos and
Google Docs can all be directly em-
bedded within the Wave for watching,
editing, reading or viewing. Examples
given by Google for real world use of
Wave could be checking of a contract,
reviewing the document and pulling
bits of text out into Waves for collabo-
rative editing. Now I can see myself ed-
iting journal articles and joint project
write-ups like this, so for students it
could be incredibly useful for all the
group projects everyone seems to have
to go through. Another stand out fea-
ture that might be incredibly useful,
if it works as described, are the use of
Wave extensions, one of which was
real-time (can you see a trend here?)
translation. Imagine talking to a friend
in Brazil in Portuguese, just by typ-
ing in English. Now I must admit that
machine translation has never been
particularly accurate, but it should be
sufficient for your friend to work out
nections on your laptop, palmtop and
even your desktop. Mind you looking
at the hulking rig they used to demon-
strate it, I wouldn’t expect to see this
in your iPhone/iPod any time soon, but
rumours have it appearing in the Au-
tumn 2010 Mac line.
In other news, the first ever writ
via Twitter was served by the British
High Court this week. The injunction
was one against an anonymous Twit-
ter user impersonating the right-wing
what you’re saying. Language barrier
be damned, we will converse about
that sick YouTube video, even if we
don’t speak the same language.
The beauty of Google Wave however
has to be in the code, and forgive me
if this is boring to some of you, but it’s
mostly written in HTML5. This means
that without any major effort, it should
work on any up-to-date browser on
any platform on any device with fea-
ture parity. The obvious implementa-
tion is the mobile platforms. Google
is right on this and as of the developer
preview a working iPhone webapp
complete with pretty home screen icon
was working, with one exception edit-
ing. It’s something that’s not supported
directly in HTML5 but is also some-
thing that could change by the time the
webapp hits the wider world.
So will Wave succeed? I find it hard
to believe it won’t. Will it be useful, un-
doubtedly it will be useful for anyone
who wants collaboratively edit some-
thing, and so for students I think it
could be a really useful tool. Will it re-
place everything else? No, and I think
that’s where the hype out-reaches the
possibility for the product. With a load
of social networking sites, IM networks
and good old email pretty entrenched,
Google Wave is not going to roll in and
wash all else out. Should you be excit-
ed? Well I’m intrigued and I think you
should check it out as soon as you can,
which may not be for a good while, but
it’s not going to be earth shattering
when it lands.
blogger Donal Blaney, owner of Griffin
Law. This decision to employ Twitter
as a legitimate service for serving the
injunction is interesting from many as-
pects. The law tends to be a somewhat
slow and behind the times force which
has shown unexpected forward think-
ing. It also means that a precedent has
been set for both serving writs across
the service and also the targeting of
anonymous abuse across the internet.
As the film industry and now both
Sky and Sony among others all push
towards 3D TV, Sony made a signifi-
cant announcement of a single lens
3D video camera. Up until now, all
3D recording was essentially done by
bolting two lenses with two sensors
together. This meant that the camera
is both bulky and not suited for any
fast moving recording such as sport.
A
pple Tablet. Ha, now I have
your attention. It’s all over
the news, some mythical,
do it all device that’s going
to replace your computer, your phone,
your life. It’s going to end world hun-
ger, make you super-human and might
even get you laid.
Bollocks! You say? Well you’d be spot
on. The thing is, it’s all bollocks. At this
stage no one knows anything. Serious-
ly, it’s all hearsay and rumour. Some
might be more legitimate than others,
but it’s all still rumours. Yes, Foxconn
might make it (they’re the chinese
company who makes the iPhone, and
the one with the ‘suicide’ secracy pol-
icy). And yes Apple probably has been
trying to make one since 2003, but
most good tech companies make in-
roads along all avenues of research and
development at one stage or another.
Otherwise they wouldn’t be ‘good’ tech
companies. So until Mr. Jobs pulls one
out of his pocket and/or manialla enve-
lope, don’t believe everything you read.
More Apple news this week which
should be of interest to anyone think-
ing of getting an iPhone in the near fu-
ture. O2 exclusivity deal for the iPhone
Get involved!
So you’ve read what I’ve got to say, but don’t let that stop you. If
you’ve got a passion for technology, got something to say, or just
want to heckle me over some sordid gadget then get involved!
Email me at: technology.felix@imperial.ac.uk
If it’s something decent you might even end up in felix one week.
Sony have shoved two CMOS sensors
behind one lens with the light split by
a system of mirrors. This is good news
for anyone who’s after 3D football in
the near future or fancies themselves
a 3D film maker (with a large bank
balance).
Electric cars also got some love this
week in the form of another fantas-
tic looking sports car, the e-Wolf e-2,
which is set to give the Shelby Aero
and of course the Tesla Roadster a run
for their money. Looking like the boys
2
In a place filled
with digital
Samuel Gibbs Technology Editor
in the UK will run out in the next cou-
ple of months. Both Orange, which is
in the process of trying to merge with
T-mobile to create the biggest UK net-
work, and Vodaphone have already
announced availability of the iPhone
from late 2009/early 2010. I say great
news as O2 totally rips iPhone users off
with crappy tarrifs and arguably poor
3G service anywhere but London.
Of course O2 still have their grubby
mits on a Palm Pre exclusivity con-
tract, so anyone seeking a bit of we-
bOS are still stuck with the Telefonica
off-shoot.
Spotify brought their offline playlist
caching to the desktop this week fol-
lowing their mobile apps on the iPhone
and Gphones. Unfortunately requiring
a premium £9.99 pcm subscription,
the desktop Spotify app now comes
armed with a simple offline switch.
Spotify is certainly gunning for your
hard-earned here and a piece of the
iTunes market share. Personally I think
they should enable the mobile apps
and caching for the free ad-supported
accounts, but I guess you’ve got to have
some sort of incentive to go premium.
from Lambo gave it the once over and
boasting more than 1000Nm of torque
with a top speed of 250Km/h (that’s
155mph in old money) the e-2 might
make a decent pin up yet.
Batteries also got some love from
IBM this week, with the announce-
ment that they’ve assigned a task force
of about 40 to the Battery 500 project.
The aim is to boost battery storage
density by a factor of 10 in an effort
to get electric cars to the mythical
500mile range. Focusing on lithium-
air technology, they’re not going to
feature in a car you can buy any time
soon, but it’s really important for the
evolution of the electric car to have a
storage system that can power it for a
decent distance, so good on you IBM,
fingers crossed for swift and effective
development.